Advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies have provided us with the ability to communicate directly with the brain. It has been made possible through sensors that can monitor the neural activity within the brain. This technology has been used to build Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) that enables direct communication pathway between the brain and the object to be controlled or communicated to. It provides users with an alternate method for acting on the world.
There were three main objectives for this body of work: investigate, prototype and evaluate brain computer interfaces.
1) The main goal of the project was to familiarise with the BCI technology and understand its various design methodologies and implementation. An extensive review of the current literature of BCI was carried out that included the history, design and applications of the technology. Various existing applications and tools were compared and studied.
2) The next step was to use this knowledge gained from the investigation and design a BCI system. The BCI system was designed using facial expression. The facial expressions smile, clench, furrow, smirk and neutral were chosen to drive the system. This system designed was then integrated to Nao humanoid robot to enable its control using facial expressions. Another BCI application developed was a skype dialler that enables a user to choose a contact from the dialler screen and call the selected contact using Skype.
3) A major focus of the project was the evaluation of BCI system. The accuracy and usability of the BCI system with facial expressions was analysed. A study was undertaken to determine the reliability and consistency of the signals caused due to facial expressions. This was achieved by conducting various experiments on users and by analysing the brain signal data collected during the experiments.